James Poulos writes about political news, focusing on our choices for liberty and our options for reform. He's a columnist at The Daily Beast, the host of the Free Radicals podcast, and the frontman of a band called Black Hi-Lighter.

News breaks that the latest and greatest film about residents of the White House has indulged in possibly the genre’s worst casting choices yet:

Based on a on a Washington Post article by Wil Haygood, “The Butler” tells the story of Eugene Allen, the late White House butler who served eight presidents during his tenure from 1952 to 1986. Forest Whitaker will topline the movie as Allen in a terrific, growing ensemble that includes David Oyelowo as Allen’s son and Oprah Winfrey as Allen’s wife, as well as Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr and Oscar nominee Terrence Howard in undisclosed roles. While Kravitz’s role is also unknown, the confusion over the Presidential roles is clearing up with Alan Rickman playing Ronald Reagan (Jane Fonda will play Nancy Reagan, much to the consternation of Conservatives), while John Cusack will play Richard Nixon. Matthew McConaughey, curiously, will play John F. Kennedy (we can hear it now: “All right, all right, Ich bin ein Berliner”), with Kelly taking the role of Jacqueline Kennedy.

Make that a terrifying growing ensemble. It’s a brilliant idea to use the longtime presidential butler to explore decades of personal drama and social change at the pinnacle of power. But that idea becomes less brilliant, not more, when it requires viewing audiences to suspend disbelief and embrace Matthew McConaughey, Jane Fonda, or perhaps even Lenny Kravitz as big-time political figures. Even John Cusack is a stretch. (I won’t kick Oprah while she’s down.) The problem isn’t that these people aren’t talented. I’m happy to presume that they’re genuinely devoted to the material in a more artistic than political way. No, the trouble is that they’re celebrities. Their public personae are so fully formed that it’s not just silly but onerous for a viewer to indulge the casting choices and try to imagine what they’re seeing bears some relation at all to what really happened. This isn’t a biopic like I’m Not There, which inventively cast a whole slate of famous actors (including Cate Blanchett) to all play varieties of Bob Dylan. That kind of biographical fantasy can work because it’s clearly a fantasy. Try to shoehorn a grab bag of movie celebs into a play-it-straight film with the arc and ambition of The Butler, and watch as the fantasy and the realism commence mutually assured destruction.

It’s a mistake that’s plagued all too many Hollywood productions about presidents. Oliver Stone made it by casting Anthony Hopkins as Nixon. (He compensated by casting then-not-so-famous Josh Brolin in W., a film with other unmet challenges.) It’s still a mystery why anyone believed John Adams should be portrayed by Paul Giamatti. Greg Kinnear and Barry Pepper were vague enough personages to step into the Kennedy brothers’ shoes, but Katie Holmes as Jackie? Why do that to your production? Why do that to audiences?

Maybe it’s a reaction against the sorry fate of even the presidential flicks that don’t ruin themselves with casting. Remember The Reagans? Technically, that TV film went down in a spiral of conservative-fueled controversy over its allegedly unbalanced portrayal of the Gipper. More to the point, if there had been real confidence in the quality of the film, it likely wouldn’t have been handed off to Showtime. Hollywood just isn’t very good at this.

But contrast the many disappointments to the fictional political work Hollywood has done. The West Wing? Wag the Dog? Air Force One? Dave? Bullworth? All beloved classics, more or less. Even The American President, one of the more self-consciously ‘realistic’ POTUS films, was watchable. Here’s the paradox: no matter how over-the-top something like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Huntermight be, it can’t beat a film for ridiculousness that seriously expects normal human beings to take the stars cast in The Butler at anything but face value.

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